Jewish Workers Choruses

JEWISH WORKERS CHORUSES. From the 1920s through the 1960s, a Jewish workers’ choral movement flourished, with thousands singing Yiddish folk and labor songs of Europe and the United States. Developing national networks of affiliated choruses across the United States and Canada, this movement played an important role in sustaining Yiddish secular culture, left-wing activism, and Jewish identity.

Distinctly different from religious choirs, the Jewish secular choral movement began in Poland in the 1880s, enlivened with the modernist spirit of the Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment). With increasing Jewish emigration to the United States, young immigrants formed Yiddish singing societies to continue the musical tradition that had come to play a central role in Eastern European Jewish life. Because many of these immigrants suffered harsh living and working conditions, the demands and visions of a young, literary, and street wise Jewish socialist movement could be woven into the lyrical themes and social purpose of these new choral groups.

In the early 1910s, the New York Arbeter Ring/Workmen’s Circle, the first large-scale Jewish workers’ fraternal order, established what would become one of the major long-term choral groupings. By 1914, a Jewish Socialist Workers Chorus had been established in Chicago. In 1918, the Paterson Singing Society formed in the New Jersey mill town that in 1913 had seen one of the largest mass strikes in US labor history. Another early chorus, the Poalei Tzion Singing Society, represented the young Labor-Zionist movement coming out of Russia.

Splitting from the Workmen’s Circle in 1923, the more left-wing frayhayt gezangs ferein (Freedom Singing Club), formed in New York, drawing upon the urgings of the Comintern on the rights of “nationalities” and the duty of Communists to work with them. Taking the same frayhayt name as the new Yiddish Communist daily paper, the new chorus stood for a militant, trade unionist, Soviet-related perspective while holding to a “high” theatrical Yiddish standard. Soon, in New York and elsewhere, they added choral activity within the Yiddish children’s schools attended after regular school hours. The Workmen’s Circle version, attended by a mostly older and more assimilated generation, opted for a more moderate approach politically but also in musical terms.

The original choral music that developed within the frayhayt Left enriched itself through the use of eclectic sources: Hebrew religious chants, Slavic and Yiddish folk melodies, and Yiddish theater tunes, with lyrics often drawn from Yiddish poets and writers. This completely new and unique Jewish American musical form melded religious, folk, and revolutionary styles into classically oriented choral arrangements.

The influence of choral leader and composer Jacob Shaefer exemplifies the elevation of Yiddish folk music into a classical proletarian movement. Born in 1888, the son of a poor Jewish carpenter in a small Russian town near Galicia, he split his youth between working in his father’s shop and perfecting his recognized musical talents in local synagogues. In his teens he became the cantor of a large synagogue in Galicia. The influence of early religious training would be heard throughout his choral compositions in religious chanting accents and tonalities.

Coming to the United States in 1910, Shaefer studied music at the Chicago Conservatory, continuing work as a carpenter and achieving prominence as the leader of the Jewish Socialist Workers Chorus. After his conversion to the Communist milieu and with his guidance, Chicagoans took the lead in size and influence. Nevertheless, New Yorkers first performed his oratorio Tscey Brider (Two Brothers), based on a moralistic, poetic fable by Yiddish classicist Y.L. Perets (Peretz) before Sheyfer moved to New York in 1925. From his new location, he led the Frayhayt Gezangs Farein (FGF). Under his guidance, a National Jewish Musical Union formed and the left-wing choral movement flourished. By the mid-1930s, forty branches of the FGF existed across the United States. Shaefer also encouraged the development of mandolin orchestras, which grew up alongside many of the choruses. By the time of his untimely death in 1936, he had written eleven large-scale oratorios and cantatas and over a hundred original songs and settings of Jewish folk songs.

Sheyfer’s most popular work, an operetta entitled A bunt mit a stashke (A Revolt and a Strike) emerged around his arrangements of Yiddish folk, labor and revolutionary songs. It premiered 9 November 1935, at the storied Venice Theater on Broadway, where Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater had performed and where, a year later, Orson Welles would famously and defiantly lead the Federal Theatre Project “The Cradle Will Rock,” to perform from seats in the audience.

For more than twenty years, socialistic choruses thrived, not only among the Communist-leaning left but also among their socialist rivals and counterparts in the socialistic urban groups and summer camps. Dozens of cities, but especially New York (where middelshuln, middle schools, also boasted choruses in large numbers), Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles the Bay Area and Miami had their own versions. The dramatic growth of the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), Jewish section of the International Workers Order, during the Popular Front period and again during World War II, added further to public interest and the excitement of participation, with some choruses numbering as many as 100 members.
After the War, and despite the arrival of a fresh group of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the leftwing choruses entered a slow decline. The mixture of McCarthyism, suburbanization, and the new priorities of Jewish middle class families all worked against the propering of the chouses. Still, most of them survived for decades, as he Yidisher folks khorn-Jewish Folk (People’s) Choruses. They were conducted nationwide via the Yidisher muzik farband/Jewish Music Alliance, which continued to provide scores and music books, to recurit and assign conductors, into the 1970s. In 1964, the Alliance published 50 yor yidish gezang in amerike (50 Years of Yiddish Song in America). This totemic volume included brief histories and summaries of sixteen choruses then functioning, including the Bronx, Brighton Beach, Lakewood, New Jersey, also Newark, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Petaluma, California.

The choruses remained an integral part of the Left movements that sponsored them. Any significant political or cultural event, including fundraisers, anniversary commemorations or rallies in support of political and labor issues or, significantly, the rights of nonwhites in the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, would open with a performance of appropriate songs by the local Gezangs Fareyn. In turn, the movements provided ample audiences of the choruses’ own annual concerts featuring larger works, most often from the Sheyfer repertoire.

The Jewish Young Fraternalists, prominent alumni of the JPFO supplementary afternoon Yiddish schools and their summer Camp Kinderland, founded their own movement during the later 1940s. A natural vanguard for members in New York’s boroughs, the youngsters had in effect declared independence from their parents while preserving left-wing ideals and some organizational forms. The chorus took particular inspiration from the prominence of Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace.

The Jewish Fraternalists’ first conductor, Hal Colter, determined to create a new repertoire, discovered in songbooks an old “Negro Spiritual” entitled “We Will Overcome.” His arrangement, retitled “We Shall Overcome,” was adopted at the highlander Folk School, in Tennessee, learned and sung there by many including two prominent trainees, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. “We Shall Overcome” has endured as the anthem of the civil rights movement and its successors.

Interviewed in their later years about the attraction of Yiddish choruses, singers looked back upon the combination of choruses, newspapers, clubs, theater groups, athletic teams and summer camps as a unique, inclusive Jewish Left culture. Beyond the political connections, the warm relationships among singers who met weekly and usually after stressful work, enriched their individual lives while creating art communally. Close relationships of all kinds, including marriage, flowed naturally between those who met and worked together in the chouses.

Through the worst years of the Cold War and beyond, despite disillusionments with hopes for the Soviet Union and likewise with the hopes for socialistic change in the US, choruses soldiered onward. As their memberships grew steadily older, they performed segments more often in English to accommodate youngers members and audiences, often adding pieces adapted from wider Jewish cultural traditions. Thus Jewish choruses anticipated and sometimes shared participants with younger-generation labor choruses, often sponsored by state labor history societies, often including many of the same themes of historic struggles and hopes for social change, but largely in English. The revival of choruses in younger generations coincided with the revival of klezmer music, whose lyrics and melodies brought Yiddish and historic traditions of social content to new generations.

A small scale but significant revival of the Workmens (later Workers) Circle during the 1990s found the children or grandchildren of the Popular Front Left becoming active and often leading members of what once had been the anticommunist rival organization to the JPFO. Wherever Workers Circle branches emerged or revived, notably in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, a chorus found younger participants. A high profile group, A Besere Velt (a better world), founded in Boston in 1997 and sponsored by the Arbeter Ring, performed widely at conferences, picket lines, Jewish Community Centers, interfaith rallies and in formal concerts. In 2020, the Jewish Folk Chorus of San Francisco, with its older history mostly in Petaluma, celebrated its ninety-fourth anniversary.

Epstein, Melech. The Jew and Communism, 1919–1941. New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1959.

Liebman, Arthur. Jews and the Left. New York: John Wiley, 1979.

Slobin, Mark. Tenement Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Yardeni, Mordecai, S., ed. Fifty Years of Yiddish Song in America. New York: Jewish Music Alliance, 1964.